The Almighty (And Sometimes Awkward) Kiss Cam
Kiss cam is an audience-participation game involving a camera that aims to catch couples and encourage them to share a kiss. The public display of affection is shown on a “jumbotron” or other large screens in the event venue, typically in a heart-shaped frame.
It is unclear when the first official kiss cam took place, but it’s believed that the phenomenon began during breaks in baseball games in the early 1980s in California. The Los Angeles Dodgers franchise is central to kiss cam history, as Dodger Stadium was the first to introduce “Diamond Vision,” a large video display (later known colloquially as a jumbotron) in 1980 during the MLB All-Star Game. Other teams then followed the Dodgers’ lead and installed jumbotrons of their own. It was on these giant screens that the kiss cam was born.
The persuasive power of the camera
The command of the kiss cam is hard to deny. Its directions are straightforward, so when the camera lands on you, “you know what you’re going to do,” an executive for Van Wagner Big Screen Network told Deadspin in 2014. However, when caught, some participants find joy in going against the cam’s orders.
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Kiss-can’ts
Fans have rebelled against the camera’s insistence on kissing the person next to them by getting creative. In a Grand Rapids Griffins YouTube compilation with 30 million views, many fans smooch their cold stadium beer rather than the person next to them, and one man goes above and beyond what the kiss cam asks, proposing to his partner.
Audiences often defy the camera’s expectations with a valid excuse. One such instance occurred in 2014 after a hockey fan came prepared to a University of Minnesota Gophers game with a sign reading “my sister,” which he displayed as the kiss cam caught him and his sibling. The clip went viral on YouTube, earning 12 million views in the first week it was posted, and it even made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show.
A similar sibling mix-up blew up online a decade later, when Olivia Rodrigo implemented a kiss cam for her 2024–25 Guts World Tour. During the show in Sydney, the well-intentioned pop singer asked a presumed couple to kiss for the “Guts Cam” before realizing the two concertgoers were siblings. “Olivia Rodrigo asking my sister and I to kiss was not on my 2024 bingo card,” the brother wrote in a social media post. Rodrigo apologized in the comments.
A history of homophobia
Sometimes those who did want to participate in the game were not picked, and their communities were mocked in displays of poor sportsmanship. Kiss cams, the origins of which aimed to catch the “average,” and therefore heterosexual, sports-fan couple in an embrace, did not include everyone. The tradition early on was to use kiss cams between non-straight couples to gibe at opposing teams, often showing two male players together as the brunt of a homophobic joke.
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In 2015 the New York Mets vowed to stop showing players on the kiss cam after fans complained that the stunt was in poor taste. Etan Bednarsh, a Mets fan, tweeted at the team after its kiss cam showed two male Phillies players, saying, “Putting two men together on the kiss cam isn’t a punch line. I want to keep coming to games. Please stop doing this.”
Other fans made their voices heard the same year, and Dodger Stadium featured one of the first gay kiss cams between husbands Steven and Rick Simone-Friedland, prompting cheers from the crowd.
Jumbo-sizing private lives
Alternatively, in 2025, a viral kiss cam moment caused great controversy rather than celebration.
For its Music of the Spheres World Tour, the band Coldplay implemented a concert-based kiss cam. Each night, the group performed “The Jumbotron Song,” during which cameras landed on fans in the audience and lead singer Chris Martin improvised lyrics about them. In Foxborough, Massachusetts, the group was performing the song when the cameras cut to a couple embracing. After the pair spotted themselves on screen, the man, who was later identified as the CEO of a tech company, dodged out of the camera’s view. The woman, who turned out to be the company’s head of human resources, then abruptly turned and hid from the band’s camera crew as well. Baffled, Martin wondered aloud, “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy. I’m not quite sure what to do.”
Thanks to the work of the jumbotron and the smartphone-sized cameras Coldplay’s audience members carried in their pockets, the moment was doubly documented. And one fan’s video made its way onto TikTok, where Internet sleuths were able to deduce the couple’s identities and occupations. The scandal resulted in both resigning from the company.
In an interview for This Morning, the Coldplay fan who posted the viral video responded to those who blamed her for airing the couple’s dirty laundry. “There was over 50,000 people, and I’m not the only one that caught it on camera. So if it wasn’t me who uploaded it, I’m sure someone else would’ve.”
The kiss cam, a fun break between concert ballads or baseball innings, can cause quite a stir—especially now that its brief scans of the crowd are being rerecorded through social media. So keep its interesting history and often embarrassing hijinks in mind before you’re caught by the camera and forced to pose or duck.